


A Monster, Unrecognizable

by OneBraincellEnergy



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Eventual Relationships, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route Spoilers, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hurt/Comfort, Includes Canon, POV Third Person Omniscient, PTSD, Poisoning, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Spoilers for Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Trauma, it’s just an extension of real-game events, technically envenomation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2020-12-31 15:17:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21147830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneBraincellEnergy/pseuds/OneBraincellEnergy
Summary: He recognized her. All at once, his shoulders went slack, eyes wide and searching as five years of mourning welled in his chest. A sound like a tight, choking laugh escaped him. His breath hitched. He mouthed the word “Goddess.” Then, as quickly as it came, the surprise vanished and hardened into a cynical, desperate growl like broken glass.





	1. Regret

When she tried to think about it, it was as though she had slept, dreamed, awakened with the haze of sleep still upon her. She remembered the textured stone of the monastery walls, gritty and familiar against her fingers. The greenery and opulence, the marketplace alive and bustling, the faces. She remembered the faces clearest of all, remembered as though she had seen them only hours before.

_ Five years. _

The time seemed impossible. When she left the farmer who had fished her out of the river, Byleth had knelt on the bank and stared at her own reflection privately, reeling at how little the years seemed to grip her features. She had simply stepped from the battlefield - from Rhea’s side, she remembered numbly - through a tear in reality into a crumbling nightmare. As she had wept in secret into the water she wished she was still dreaming.

The walk to the monastery was familiar, and her feet carried her autonomously as she dwelled on her slowly-returning memories. The faces. Her students. Her students rising against a threat they had once called a friend. Gripping their weapons, ready to kill, ready to die, cherubic and pale beneath plates of steel and bolts of leather. Byleth’s throat tightened around the violence she had almost forgotten - the arrow that had pinned Annette’s shoulder into the muddy ground, Sylvain’s strange, hardened expression as he drove his lance through the flesh of classmates, Dimitri’s strangled cries… 

Children, Byleth thought bitterly. Children she had sworn to protect, yet led blindly into battle against an army of thousands. She wondered through the dull, creaking pain in her chest how many of them had survived the day, the month, the last five years.

She was awakened from her thoughts by the familiar stone enclosure that surrounded what once had been the Goddess Tower. The greenery had long since died away. All that remained were the heavy, crumbling walls, wearing year after year into the plots of dust surrounding the tower. Byleth dragged her hand along the curve of the ancient walls and turned into the arched doorway.

Years of mercenary work never dulled the immediate pang of regret and revulsion that came with seeing the faces of the dead. Byleth sighed. The farmer had warned her of the slaughter, a tale she had naively hoped to be the sensational exaggeration of small town gossip. 

It was not.

The Empire soldiers lay in thick pools of their own blood, faces drawn in pinched masks of confusion and agony. They had died before they could see what had sent them to the flames, had fallen in masses of limbs and gore upon the stone steps. Byleth gripped the cold metal of the Sword at her hip and stepped over the bodies. 

The top of the tower had been destroyed those years ago, crumbling at the corner and streaming with daylight. Byleth stepped into the light slowly, watching for movement, but she was already distracted by the powerful memories she had of this place. Her heart stung with a cold pressure that chilled her. Sylvain, his smiling face like sunlight in her mind’s devastated cloud, a smile that came too easy and covered too much. She wished, for a moment that threatened to overcome her, that she could see that smile again. Even once more.

No time for that, a cold voice reminded her in her head, and she saw the shadow in the dark. He sat with his back against the wall, hunched over his knees, stained blonde tresses obscuring his face, perfectly still such that Byleth swore he must be dead. But he lifted his head, regarded her as she stepped closer to his shadowed corner, tense with the impulse to fight. To kill.

His hair has grown, Byleth thought hollowly, her throat going dry. And grown, it had, in shaggy yellow mats long past hope of grooming. One eye was hidden beneath a black patch, the other cloaked in a thick fog of hate - a feral, instinctive anger devoid of any trace of the kindness Byleth had once known in him. His hands, squeezed white around the handle of a dripping scythe, were scarred, calloused, and stained with the blood of others.

He recognized her. All at once, his shoulders went slack, his one eye wide and searching as five years of mourning welled in his chest. A sound like a tight, choking laugh escaped him. His breath hitched. He mouthed the word “Goddess.” Then, as quickly as it came, the surprise vanished and hardened into a cynical, desperate growl like broken glass.

Byleth approached until her feet nearly touched his own and extended her hand. He stared at the gesture, unreadable but shaking.

“I should have known,” Dimitri said, voice ragged, “that one day, you would come to haunt me as well.”

He stared at the phantom bathed in righteous light and was struck by how, even now, these vision of his failures could wound him. But Byleth did not look at him with eyes that accused, did not howl condemnations of his shortcomings, his weaknesses. Her face was filled with an unfamiliar, gentle pity that aroused in him a new, self-conscious kind of rage. She was, as she had always been, different from the others. 

“You,” he almost laughed, “What must I do to be rid of you? I will kill that woman, I swear it. Do not look upon me with scorn in your eyes!”

Byleth withdrew her hand and lowered herself to kneel beside him, aching with a sudden and overwhelming sense of loss. He followed her with his eye, glaring with apprehension and mistrust, tense with the stunned, angry terror of a cornered animal. Byleth reached for him. He flinched, gasped at the tenderness of her touch.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said, and for a suffocating moment that vanished too soon he believed her. When it went, it left in its wake a blistering void that threatened to swallow his sense. His mind screamed in protest, like the child he had worked so hard to kill in himself begging for one more moment in the sunlight. He steeled himself in his rage. 

“You… it can’t be. You’re alive?” It was an accusation. “If that is the case, that can only mean you are another Imperial spy. Did you come here to kill me?”

For the first time, Byleth noticed how tired he looked. Deadly, yes, but thoroughly exhausted with a shadow blooming under his eye. The furious tension in his shoulders, his arms, his chest seemed to hold up his body against its will. He was younger, she knew, than his features revealed, a child under the weathered face, the war-hardened body, the hate. Byleth searched for something alive in his cold stare, a remnant of the young prince who had once regarded her so gently. She was met with nothing but furious glaring, his jaw firmly set.

“Answer the question.”

“Of course not,” Byleth said softly. His shoulders seemed to relax, but the tension was replaced by a kind of manic energy. In a quick but strained movement, he pulled himself to his feet and growled something unintelligible in his frustration. Picking herself up to join him, Byleth reached out for his fur-cloaked shoulder but could not bring herself to touch him. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

She regretted it as soon as she said it - even more so when Dimitri cut her off with an icy laugh that echoed on the vaulted stone ceiling. He kept his back to her.

“Am I?”

Without another word, he walked into the inky darkness of the stairwell, his footsteps sickly and wet in the congealed blood. Byleth’s head swam, and as she reeled she felt she might vomit. Only moments prior she had lost Dimitri, lost five years of her life, lost everything she had known at Garreg Mach. Now, as she braced herself in the arch of the stone doorway, she felt the tear as she lost the young prince again - this time before her very eyes. 

He was alive. He breathed before her, spoke to her, radiated magnetism and power the way only Dimitri could. He had retained his regality and authority and had grown into his frame, now the picture of the perfect warrior. She could have reached out and touched him, felt the proof of his pulse beneath the skin of his wrists. 

And he was dead. The boy Byleth had caught in the dead of night holding a delicate needle between his strong fingers, practicing his stitching by candlelight had disappeared from both his body and soul. There was ice behind his stare, a cool and appraising hatred. When he regarded her, it was as though she was witnessing a machine. Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd had survived, but her friend had not.

She followed him, suppressing her nausea. He limped with every step. As they approached the cathedral Byleth’s head began to clear, her grief hardening to a building anger the longer he ignored her. By the time they had reached the crumbling altar, she could no longer hold her tongue.

“What have you been doing these past five years?” Byleth demanded, harsher than she had intended. He did not notice, or else did not care. He stopped but did not turn to her.

“I have been dead, more or less.”   


“Why do you say that?”

“What do you hope to gain, asking me that?” he turned to her sharply. “There are more important matters at hand.”

Byleth said nothing, boiling her in her own silent anger.

“Do you not smell them? Filthy rats. Everywhere,” Dimitri growled. “And traces of those who were here long ago. And thieves, crawling from the woodwork, attracted by the promise of treasure. Since the monastery fell, order in the area fell right along with it. You must have seen the state of the tower near Garreg Mach on your way here.” His gaze travelled as he spoke, tracing lines along the destroyed walls. It was as though he could see the cathedral as it once was, see the shadows of those long since evacuated from its destruction.

“I have,” Byleth said crisply. 

“Vile thieves run rampant. They pillage and loot to their heart’s content. I must kill them. Every last one. It’s time to hunt down their nest.”

“What do you plan to do?” Byleth asked, though she knew the answer. She tasted acid in her mouth.

“I told you,” he said, finally looking at her with unfiltered contempt. “I will kill them all.”

“Dimitri, we don’t have to kill them to stop them.” It was an appeal that would have worked before - an appeal to life. But this was not then, and Dimitri simply held her gaze and folded his arms. Closed to her.

“They must die. Someone must put a stop to this cycle of the strong trampling the weak,” he said, stepping so close to her that she was forced to look up to meet his eye. “Or do you condone their actions? Do you believe that the pillaging and slaughtering those rats live for is justified?” Dimitri’s anger built upon itself, working him into a barely-capped frenzy as he pushed past Byleth. He was talking more to himself than to her. 

“It is reprehensible, and they must be put down! I intend to give them a taste of the pain they have inflicted on others. Even if it means becoming a rat myself. I swore to at least do that much. I will not let them down.” His voice trailed into a low snarl and he closed his eye, his words a prayer to something unseen. 

He was beyond Byleth’s reach. She turned to look out the open cathedral door, scanning from her memory the sheer sprawling size of Garreg Mach’s campus. How many thieves could be hiding within its walls? How many could she, newly-awakened from a half decade blackout, and the young prince, wracked with grief and rage, hope to fell before meeting their own grisly ends?

“Can just the two of us hope to prevail?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is killing those that deserve to die.”

\---

The thieves Dimitri spoke of seemed felicitously wary of the monastery’s massivity, and thus had confined themselves to just the marketplace, entrance hall, and reception hall. From the looks of things, a small group could split on either end and trap the large majority of the bandits in the center. But Dimitri and Byleth were not a small group. 

Before she could say a word, Dimitri kicked open the door to the reception hall and cut down an idle thief across the neck and chest. He slumped to the floor, dead before his companions had seen Dimitri arrive. The young prince blazed a trail of blood and steel through the hall, carrying one fluid slash into another as thieves fell faster than seemed possible. Byleth took up a defensive stance behind him, guarding his dangerously-exposed back. As Dimitri swung too hard with the momentum of his scythe, Byleth knocked a bandit back and took a chunk out of his chest with the Sword pulsating in her hand. 

Turning to her between swings, Dimitri snarled, “ _ I don’t need your help _ .”

She ignored him, worrying instead about the growing onslaught of increasingly-armed bandits sweeping into the reception hall. They were as good a team as they ever were, but Byleth and Dimitri were hopelessly outnumbered. As Byleth did the math, she realized with a sinking gut that no amount of luck would be enough to save them. How quickly second chances run out, she thought as she watched him tear through another pair of bandits. 

It was no longer a mystery why Dimitri had come to be known as an unfathomable monster, a nightmare in the dark to the people of the town below the monastery. His movements were not human. He had developed a technique of his own in the intervening five years, leaving behind not a trace of the refined skill he had learned during his time at the Officer’s Academy. He left nothing of himself behind when he fought, throwing all his considerable strength at his opponent and using it to gruesome ends. While his left hand physically pulled one bandit into the blade of his scythe, the other dislocated a second’s shoulder and pummeled her into the ground, where her head was met with the heel of his boot. For the first time, Byleth’s pity and anger were replaced by the grip of fear.

It was a fear that distracted her. Byleth did not even have the time to hear Jeralt’s chiding voice in her head before Dimitri, in a manic fit of violence, grappled a bandit to him and dragged the scythe’s blade across his throat, leaving his back open to the newest wave of thieves. Byleth lunged past him, but she was too late. Dimitri’s face twisted in agony, his eye alight with the sudden reality of death, blood cascading from his mouth. And then they were on top of him, muffling his screams with their bodies. Byleth could hear the sickly sound of metal through flesh before his cries fell away into silence. The young prince was dead.

The corners of Byleth’s vision frayed and faded. A pulse of energy like a heartbeat coursed through her, and she was dizzied by a flurry of nightmarish images. The bandits retreated from Dimitri’s broken body, he stood, the sword emerged from his back, and there he stood again with his scythe at the throat of the thief, glassy-eyed and grimacing. The energy shattered, and the scene started again.

This time, she was ready. Byleth ran past Dimitri as he dispatched the thief once more, standing with her back against his. Her swings were reckless, angry, terrified, but she watched with overwhelming relief as they fell to her sword. Her breath came in wracking sobs, and for a moment she was simply swinging at blurry shapes through the tears welling in her eyes. Not again, she thought like a mantra.  _ Not again, not again, not again. _

“His Highness!” a gruff and familiar voice rang through the reception hall’s vaulted ceiling. Gilbert, silver armor gleaming like sunlight, had entered the southernmost door, his sword dripping with fresh blood. “And… Professor? We must speak later.” 

Another figure emerged from behind Gilbert, taller than Byleth remembered but lanky as ever, bow drawn and readied in his slender hands. “I know it’s been five years,” Ashe said, surveying the carnage, “but I never expected the monastery to end up like this.”

Byleth’s breath returned to her in a gulp that left her lightheaded. Ashe’s eyes widened with a start. He raised his bow, pulled, and released an arrow into the skull of a bandit who had been approaching Byleth from behind. She smiled at Ashe despite her carelessness, shaking her head in disbelief. He returned a weak smile, exhaled hard, then launched back into the action.

From beside her, another voice, airy and saccharine: “Oh! I haven’t seen any of you in such a long time!” Mercedes cried, her hands aglow with a magic aura. “I’m so glad to see you’re alive.” Diving into the fray beside her was Annette, girlish and keen as Byleth remembered. 

“We’ll help out from here,” Annette shouted to Byleth. “It’s over, thieves!”

Byleth felt Dimitri’s shoulders tense behind her. He whirled around on her, accusation and rage painted on his face. But he could not hold her gaze for long, his face betraying his pain as he looked at his old classmates. His mind folded in on itself, unable or unwilling to accept that they were truly there. “Why? Why are you here?”

One by one, the Blue Lions considered Dimitri, masking their surprise as well as they were able. Then, without a word, they each took up a defensive stance around the prince, turning their weapons and magic to the sound of approaching bandits. When Ashe grounded himself beside Byleth, he inclined his head slightly toward Dimitri, his eyebrows furrowed with concern. Byleth shook her head, a new wave of nausea rising in her throat. 

It was clear that her students had kept their training fresh. An absurd euphoria washed over Byleth as she watched their form, their nearly-perfect, battle-hardened technique. Perhaps her teaching had been worth something, after all. 

Wave after wave, the thieves flooded the hall. Some fought only to die, others ran for their miserable lives through the open doors. But the united front at the room’s center was an impenetrable force, each holding a quiet, renewed desperation to live. Then, a deafening sound burst through the northernmost door - a mass of something Byleth could barely make out in the blinding light that bathed their party. A loud and frustrated whine and huff came from the obscured silhouette. Horses.

“The monastery has become a nest of thieves,” an achingly familiar voice rang through the hall and knocked the breath out of Byleth’s chest.  _ Sylvain _ . 

“Professor!” said another from atop a pegasus - Ingrid. “You’re alive after all! But first things first - ” the sound of a lance through flesh “ - let’s defeat these thieves.”

And yet another, barreling through a wall of bandits with his sword as though they were nothing: “I’ll lend a hand,” said Felix, nodding toward the group. “We’ll catch up later.”

Dimitri stiffened. There they were, every last one of the souls he had convinced himself had died after the Battle of Garreg Mach. Five years had slipped so easily through his fingers - five lost years - and yet here they stood, each taking up their weapons beside him. How naive they must be, Dimitri thought bitterly, to lay down their lives for a monster unrecognizable. He gritted his teeth, steeled himself in resolved pain.

“Listen up,” he commanded, “We must end this quickly. There are openings in their defenses in the marketplace from the north and south. We’ll split into two and tear them apart.”

The group regarded him with measured concern, but did as the prince instructed. In groups of four and five, they took their places at the marketplace entrances and waited for their next orders. The remaining bandits, huddled around a figure carrying a massive, spiked club, whispered urgently to one another.

“The leader,” Dimitri hissed, then raised a hand and gestured decisively at the unprepared mass of thieves. “ _ Make them pay _ .”

The bandits were caught unaware by the wave of fighters suddenly surrounding them, but what Byleth and the others had in skill the bandits made up for in numbers. Within seconds, each of the Blue Lions was locked in discrete duels of their own. Blood and shouting filled the air, and through the chaos strode Dimitri, scythe clenched in his armored fist. With a single minded purpose, he pushed past the fighting to the man in the center with the club - the leader.

Byleth could not hear the exchange, but from across the marketplace she saw Dimitri’s massive form pick up the bandit leader by his throat and toss him to the floor. The fighting slowed around them as the thieves became increasingly aware of their leader’s peril. Byleth raised a hand to signal the others to stop. 

“Did you think we’d let you get away?” came Dimitri’s deranged cry as he pressed the blade of his scythe into the bandit’s throat. It drew blood, but not enough to be remotely lethal. The leader choked an agonized gargle, struggled to catch his breath. His hands tore at the scythe’s metal handle, pushing in vain against Dimitri’s weight. When the leader’s foot kicked out uselessly against Dimitri’s armored leg, the prince slammed his foot down. The bone crunched, shattered, and the bandit let out a short scream before vomiting on himself. The other bandits made no move to help their compatriot, petrified. Terrified. 

“Sylvain!” Felix shouted, his voice laced with panic and disgust, and Sylvain nodded in instant understanding. The closest to Dimitri’s gruesome display, Sylvain dismounted, thrust his lance under the scythe to knock it to the ground, then drove the lance through the bandit leader’s heart. 

For a moment, the two only stared at each other - Dimitri boiling with potent rage and Sylvain with horrified disbelief. Neither spoke, but Byleth feared the prince would tear Sylvain apart with the same reckless ferocity he had displayed in the reception hall. But Sylvain straightened, planting his lance into the hardened dirt, set his jaw, and turned his gaze to Byleth. His expression was a question.  _ How _ ? 

Nearly in unison, the remaining bandits dropped their weapons and fled to the closest exit they could find. The Blue Lions let them. The battle was over. 


	2. Fear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a kind of frozen sadness that comes with one loss too many. It does not wound, but rather seeps through the skin and poisons from within. It slowly turns the blood to stone - so slowly that it fools the griever into believing that nothing has changed. But it solidifies all the same until it steals movement and breath, and the emptiness runs as deep as the marrow in their bones.

The bandits left their leader’s body behind. The sand remained stained with blackening blood even after Sylvain and Felix had disposed of it outside the monastery walls. There was silence among Byleth’s students. They were, of course, no longer students - and certainly no longer children - but she was startled to find how well the youth in their eyes had preserved despite the years.

Most, like Ashe and Annette, looked at her with the same eagerness and pride for which she had come to care so deeply. Even after half a decade of absence, they regarded her as teacher and mentor, flushed with the desire to impress and prove. Others wore their youth like a mask. 

Ingrid remained the picture of discipline and grace, but she made little attempt to hide her exhaustion. She seemed always waiting for disaster - readied and grim but never surprised. 

Headstrong and brusque as ever, Felix shouldered the unfairness of his world quietly and, often, bitterly. But the recklessness of his razor tongue had softened. Byleth sensed an uncharacteristic uncertainty to his words and actions, as though constantly evaluating and reevaluating himself. 

Sylvain was nearly identical in all respects, a fact that chilled Byleth. Taller, hair grown, an imposing soldier by all accounts, but he tossed his weight with the same easy confidence and kept a laugh just behind his eyes. Even then, the blood of a tortured soul still dripping from his lance, he rolled his shoulders and shot a thin smile to Byleth. If she hadn’t been there herself, she would have never guessed the violence to which he had been subjected. He was, as ever, unaffected.

How long can such a facade last, Byleth wondered, turning her thoughts to herself. How often had she walled her emotions into some dark corner, saving them for a time when she was not needed, was not depended on. A time that never seemed to come. Even as she considered the last few hours, she struggled to access the gravity of her own feelings. Could she ever? She strained to remember.

“Your Highness, Professor…” a warm, hesitant voice returned her to her students. Ingrid had placed herself in front of Dimitri and Byleth, the rest of the Blue Lions gathering behind her. “I’m so glad you’re both safe.”

She meant it. And yet, as she looked meaningfully at him, Dimitri could not bring himself to believe her. In the face of her tenderness he grew uncontrollably more angry, stifling the shuddering desire to strike something. Anything. His mind hummed with a rage that was both fueled and relieved by Ingrid’s growing fear. He glowered at her, towered over her, terrified her, and was both sickened and glad for it. 

“Why are you here?” he demanded, voice thick with hate. 

Ingrid shrunk, winced, and turned to Byleth for a wordless answer. Suddenly gripped with shame, Byleth could not meet her eye. It was Ashe who finally spoke, clearly uneasy, efforting to maintain a semblance of levity.

“Did you forget?” he asked, offering a weak smile to his professor and his prince. “We all made a promise on this very day five years ago.”

Mercedes, emboldened by Ashe’s reminder, pushed past Felix. “Dimitri, weren’t you the one who asked that we all meet up here?”

“Don’t be silly, of course you remember our promise,” Annette chimed, though her optimism never found its way to her face. “That’s why you and the professor are here, right?”

Gilbert’s expression darkened, and he placed a gentle hand on Annette’s shoulder. Though she did not face her father, Annette recoiled slightly from Dimitri, startled by the confirmation of her fear of him. Her mind turned inward, battling within itself the dissonance between the young prince she had once known and the violent tyrant before her. 

“Your Highness, I have been following news of your whereabouts for a while now. I am relieved to have finally found you,” Gilbert said. Though his voice and face were sincere, Byleth could see the calculations running in his mind. Digesting the prince’s words. Evaluating his ability to lead. Assessing the damage.

“Do not call me that. I am not a prince, but a walking corpse.”

Gilbert winced, almost imperceptibly, and moved to respond, but Byleth could no longer hold her tongue. “Why would you say that?” she asked, and was surprised at how angry she sounded. Angry for her own loss, yes, but angrier still for the growing, silent panic amongst the Blue Lions. She could sense the horror, their shaken faith in the man they had trusted to lead them. How could he lead anyone as a prisoner to the ghosts in his mind?

Dimitri ignored her. Not a glace, not a flinch, no indication that she had spoken at all. But he feared that the intensity of his stare, the deliberate iron with which he armored himself, betrayed his fatigue to the pain in Byleth’s voice. Behind the ice and malice, Dimitri could feel the tug of self-hatred threatening to overtake him.

“That is what we all believed, but it is not so,” Gilbert cut in. “I can see with my own eyes that you are alive, your Highness. The jails in Fhirdiad are as solid as they come. How did you--”

“Dedue.”

Annette gasped softly, and grief’s paralyzing silence descended upon the Blue Lions. Of course, Byleth thought ruefully. Of course. She had noticed the absence of the prince’s vassal, had chosen to ignore and assume and delay the inevitable confirmation of yet another loss. But at her most honest, Byleth had known. Dedue would never have left the young prince’s side willingly. 

“What happened?” she asked, but it was clear to all that she knew.

“He’s dead. He died in my place.”

There is a kind of frozen sadness that comes with one loss too many. It does not wound, but rather seeps through the skin and poisons from within. It slowly turns the blood to stone - so slowly that it fools the griever into believing that nothing has changed. But it solidifies all the same until it steals movement and breath, and the emptiness runs as deep as the marrow in their bones. 

Each of the Blue Lions, unable to find their words, froze instead into their sorrow. Blank faces searched inward for meaning, for a foothold of sense in the unfairness of what they had lost. But they arrived, wanting, at the realization that fairness had left their lives long ago.

Gilbert cleared his throat. “I see. We will be sure to honor his loyalty, Your Highness.” His words were careful, but he could not mask the loaded hesitance that came with sacrificing tact for duty. Dimitri narrowed his eye as Gilbert swallowed his indecision.

“As far as the state of the Kingdom, the lords from the western region have declared their fealty to the Empire, starting with House Rowe,” Gilbert said. “Cornelia’s band of traitors now refers to the Kingdom territory as the Faerghus Dukedom. They’ve made Fhirdiad their stronghold as they continue to invade the eastern region.”

“Traitors?” Byleth asked.

“There is much to tell you. I will explain everything in time.”

“Well, it’s not like all of the Kingdom’s lords have sided with the Empire,” Sylvain cut in, offering a brilliant smile. “There are plenty of houses, like mine and Felix’s, that remain stubbornly opposed.”

Gilbert nodded, but remained fixed on Dimitri. “Your Highness. Please allow us to take up arms at your side once more. What we need more than anything isn’t soldiers, money, or supplies. We need the legitimate heir of Faerghus to overthrow the Empire and reclaim the Kingdom! Such is your duty. It is yours alone to bear and well worth fighting for. Only you can gather our troops and lead us back into the fight.”

The effect of his words was immediate, a ripple of anticipation spreading through the small group. Byleth turned to the prince, who remained stoic but gripped his scythe with crushing force. 

“You are still needed, Dimitri,” she said softly. 

Again, he ignored her, focusing instead on the faces looking eagerly up at him. He had shown himself to them, and still they stood ready - thrilled, even - to take up the sword and die for his sake. No, scolded a cold voice in his head. Not for you. For something that died long ago.

“I see. So you all agree that we must fight back.” He locked eyes with each of them. “And you can see how that woman… how the Empire cannot be forgiven. That we must wipe them all out until not a single one remains.”

The former students shifted uncomfortably, no longer able to meet their prince’s eye. Ashe looked meaningfully at Annette, who pressed her lips together until they went white. 

“Wipe them all out? Umm… I don’t think any of us here are suggesting anything that extreme,” she said, looking to Byleth for support. Before she could respond, Gilbert sighed heavily. 

“Professor,” he said, his eyes suddenly tired, “there is something I would like to ask you. Please join me inside the monastery.”

\---

The tale was nauseating. Betrayal from all sides, the pressures of a king foisted upon the shoulders of a boy, responsibility for the murder of his own family. A death sentence. Byleth tried to imagine the way Dimitri must have felt - deserted by those he trusted, blamed by the people he had sworn to protect, forced into a cell for a crime he did not commit. He had been fated to die, saved only by the sacrifice of his strongest bond. With his senses already ragged after Edelgard’s betrayal, it was no small wonder he had lost his hold on sanity, had begun hunting and mutilating soldiers by the hundreds in Faerghus territory. 

“I fear his deep hatred and the weight of his solitude have consumed him for far too long,” Gilbert had said of the prince. “We must bring him back from the edge on which he stands.”

She had tried to offer Dimitri her hand, to pull him from the darkness in which he dwelt, and had been found wanting by his Highness. Though five years had disappeared from her life as though it were mere moments, Dimitri had been forced to live every agonizing day with punitive clarity. Whatever he had once felt for Byleth had faded with the destruction of his childhood until it was replaced by his impenetrable rage. Their friendship had broken. What was left was no longer enough.

As Byleth walked back to her dormitory, a path that felt as familiar as her own hands, she remembered that bottomless loneliness she had felt after her father’s murder. After the initial burst, the tearing misery that had overcome her on the battlefield, she had been startled by how quickly the memory faded. Within hours she found herself trying to retrace the lines of his face, failing, furious with herself for losing his smile so quickly. She had stayed in her room for days and understood for the first time why some people never reemerge.

She had been angry. Spiteful. Exhausted. But the hands that led her back into the sunlight were those of her friends, her colleagues, each with their own kind of beautiful and tender support. They healed her heart, patching the aching absence she felt every day since. She had allowed herself to be moved by their care for her - and hers for them. 

Would Dimitri allow himself such vulnerability? Recalling the chilling hate burning relentless in his face when he looked at her, Byleth could not imagine so. But, despite the hopelessness, she could neither imagine herself consigning him to the oblivion he chose. She would fight for him, even if he tore her down with his own hands. 

“Professor?”

Ashe was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs leading to her dormitory, using the stone banister to hoist himself up to meet her. He had been waiting for her. 

His dusty hair, like the others’, was longer, and he had grown considerably taller since their last meeting. But his face radiated the youthful optimism Byleth remembered with such warmth. He held leather gloves in his hands, wringing them until they creaked in protest as she approached.

“I was hoping I could speak with you. I know you must be exhausted, though, so I understand if you’d like to recover a bit first,” he said, smiling but looking everywhere but her eyes. 

In truth, Byleth would have preferred to spend the next twenty Moons sleeping, forgetting. But, however tempting his offer, the weight of the last five years rested apparent on his face. No matter his ever-present cheer, Ashe looked at her with the wide eyed, covetous fear that she would disappear again if he turned his back. She gestured to the bottom step, shaking her head and smiling softly.

“It would be my pleasure,” she said, and they took their seats beside one another. 

They were silent awhile as Ashe twisted his gloves and his face, efforting to organize his words. 

“Are you sure you’d rather not wait until you’re fully rested?”

“Ashe, what’s troubling you?”

He sighed, heavy with a blend of anxiety and relief at her question. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, especially about something so delicate,” he began carefully, “but I have concerns about our reunion with his Highness.”

Byleth let out a short laugh. “I suppose you’re putting it mildly.”

“You agree, then,” Ashe said, wincing. “He’s different.”

“He has seen much pain.”

The boy flushed. “I would never presume to judge or mock his Highness, Professor. I know the horrors that war can bring. And I know the prince has been through enough for a lifetime.” He turned his gaze to his hands again, tightening the twist in his gloves. “But I worry for the toll this will take. On him, but also on the others.”

Byleth studied him, searching for the meaning under his diplomatic phrasing. “You think he would hurt one of us?”

Ashe groaned, clearly frustrated. “Perhaps not in the way you’re thinking. I-” he cut himself off, staring at the grass some yards away but not really seeing. He saw the blistering images of memories long stowed in the back of his mind, the face twisted by grief and anger, the body broken by Thunderbrand lying in the grass. “Do you believe Lord Lonato was a good man, Professor?”

It was a question she had answered for herself long ago, after a sleepless night and a conversation with her father. She had watched Lonato fall for the sake of the son that haunted him, had seen in the tight lines of his face that he would not be reasoned from his violence. But she had wondered that night, as sleep evaded her, whether she could truly blame him for the path he tore against the Archbishop’s life. Jeralt had poured her a strong drink, sat across from her until the sun illuminated the hills, and told her stories of those he wished he could have saved from the allure of vengeance. 

“When our pain is too much to bear, we cover it with whatever we have to,” her father said, looking somewhere beyond Byleth. “You and I could struggle for the means to change the world to fit our grief, but in the end we’re just people. But if I had the power of a king, if I really believed I could rearrange reality…” he sipped his drink. “It’s an attractive idea, isn’t it?”

“Did he deserve to die?” Byleth finally asked him, the question that had plagued her since they had returned to the monastery. Jeralt chuckled hollowly, setting his empty glass beside Byleth’s.

“You know better than that. Good people can be corrupted by just about anything. But when they hurt or kill others in their own pain? The consequences simply are what they are.”

“Yes,” said Byleth firmly, and Ashe finally met her eye. He smiled broadly when she offered no caveat, but his eyes still mourned. 

“On his behalf, thank you,” he said, “and I agree, though I can hardly be called impartial. But with time I realized that, despite his goodness, Lonato had done unforgivable things in his grief. Killed people. He would have killed  _ you _ , if he’d had the chance. For four years, he had steeped in his own rage until he was blinded to the consequences of his own actions.”

He held her gaze, momentarily overcome with emotion. “Five years ago, Dimitri wanted nothing more from me than to be my friend. He had all but coached me to call him by his first name, had to trick me into allowing him to buy us sweets to share. He is a good man. But I fear he walks a path that ends in the deaths of many.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Byleth said too quickly. Ashe shook his head slowly, though not unkindly, and in his eyes suddenly was the sharpened steel of a man who saw through her resolve. 

“I’m afraid… What if you don’t have a choice, Professor? In the end, I think it will be the prince who walks to you - but only if he chooses to do so,” he said gently. Then, turning his gaze to his hands once more, “If I may speak freely and a little presumptuously?”

She nodded. 

“You have done so much for us, Professor. The prince included. It would be kind to allow yourself the benefit of the support of those who care for you,” he said, color rising in his freckled face. “You don’t need to carry the weight alone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, people actually read this! That's incredibly exciting for me! I'm planning on writing some non-canon extension scenes for a while and have no idea when I plan on stopping because this game owns my ass, so feel free to bookmark or subscribe if you want to know when I update. And feel free to drop comments wherever, I live for the knowledge that people enjoy the things I make lol. Also I love writing prompts so I'll probably take requests? Maybe? This is new for me. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoy!


	3. Despair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But as the relief faded, the nausea spread, building upon itself end over end until her head swam with untethered panic. He stared at her, appraised her, and she knew all at once that he did not understand. Worse, an inky shadow had crept into his eyes, poisoning the way he studied her face with the cold touch of fear. He knew her, truly, for the first time since their meeting, knew her secrets and uncertainty. And his knowing, Byleth watched as his confidence in her shattered. She was unmade in the blankness of his stare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Byleth exposes herself and Sylvain is a stupid idiot who is also in love.

Byleth remained on the bottom step outside her dormitory for a while after Ashe left, savoring the comforting, distant hum of life in the monastery halls. Her limbs were leaden, pushed past exhaustion and numbly defiant to her will to stand. Her mind, however, droned with the strange and unsettling energy of thousands of voices speaking at once - impossible to parse, and impossible to ignore.

She did not notice when she finally stood and turned to her door, preoccupied and distant. Her hand curled around cold and familiar metal, pulled, enclosed her in dim light glancing off her bed, her desk, a dusty, now-empty porcelain vase.

And a figure, sitting with their fingers threaded into their hair, the black cloth of his shirt illuminated by window light. The obscured head jerked up, clearly startled by her sudden appearance, and Byleth could see his grin sparkling in the shadows. 

“Wow, I almost fell asleep there,” Sylvain said archly, reclining on the heels of his hands. “Thanks for the save.”

She simply stared at him, unable to suppress a crooked smile. His confidence was infectious, seemed to fill the tiny room in waves. The shock of now-tousled red hair fell in loose tresses around his face, and for a euphoric moment she wanted nothing more than to take his face into her hands and memorize the feeling of him on her skin. She sharply reminded herself of the professorial nature of her relationship to Sylvain Gautier. 

“Ashe was polite enough to wait outside,” she said.

“Politeness is overrated,” he replied, shrugging. “Besides, I figured you’d appreciate a little privacy after all the excitement.”

“What _ will _ people say?” Byleth chuckled, leaning against the door frame. 

He raised his eyebrows, with an impish smirk. “You could use a little scandal, Professor,” he said goodnaturedly. “Seems you’re always clean as a whistle. It’s not healthy.”

“What can I do for you, Sylvain?” she asked, laughing despite herself. Her tongue curled deliciously around his name as though it were music, a moment of inordinate bliss that she quickly shook away. 

The smile in his eyes faltered. “Well, this is embarrassing, but I don’t really know where to start.” All at once, everything about him changed. His shoulders dropped and he leaned forward onto his knees, hands clasped tightly together. The smile fell away, eyes avoiding hers, and he suddenly seemed very far away. He inhaled, deep, but did not let it go. “We all thought you died that day. For five years. I thought, after I saw you in the hall… I felt like I needed to make sure. That I hadn’t dreamed it.”

Byleth’s tongue felt like sandpaper in her mouth. “I’m here.”

Her voice awakened him from where his mind waded, and he straightened and smiled once more. Byleth’s face was tight with a concern that thinly covered her exhaustion, and Sylvain’s stomach recoiled at the sight of her pity. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Professor. I was more concerned about what you’ve been up to these last five years. Let me guess - beach vacation? No, you became a hermit.”

But he had given himself away. Her eyes bored into his face, blistering him with their intuition. She did not laugh this time, though he wished with body and soul that she would. His throat closed around an unfamiliar burn, a panic rising from his chest that squeezed and stole until he felt he would never breathe again. She approached him, holding his gaze, and he shivered at the nearness of her. 

Perched beside him on the edge of her bed, Byleth was gripped by a perplexing and overwhelming loneliness sharpened by Sylvain’s presence. He was so close, skin warming her own, listening, watching her with quiet apprehension. The thousands of voices isolated, unified, and she heard her father’s voice, chuckling with the last breaths he would ever draw, wondering at the only tears he had ever seen her shed. She heard Dimitri, positively aglow the first time he saw her smile. Flayn, comparing her stoicism to the mystery of the deepest sea. Seteth, mistrusting and interpreting her demeanor as apathy. Sothis, her lost Goddess, the voice in the dark that knew her, chiding her recklessness with her own life. And Ashe, advising her with a gentle smile in his voice to share the weight of her burdens.

“I once could hear the voice of the Goddess,” Byleth said, and she heard the words as though someone else had spoken. Sylvain’s brow twitched, not understanding. Listening. “She was as real to me as I am to you right now. She was just one mystery in a lifetime of things I may never understand about myself.

‘I bear the Crest of Flames though I should not. My life was fused with the Goddess’ before I was born, though the details are… unclear. What I _ do _ know is that I have been granted her powers more than once. The first time, she saved my life by giving me the power to turn back the hands of time. The second, you saw - she combined her soul with my own and pulled me from an empty dimension so that I may return to you and finish what I started. 

‘I did not smile, did not feel anything at all growing up as a mercenary. I was labelled the Ashen Demon for my ruthlessness. I killed without conscience, and I did not celebrate our victories. I didn’t miss my mother. I didn’t make friends. Though I am sure I loved my father, I never once felt the weight of it. That is, until I was brought here. To you. 

‘I fought alongside you, alongside the prince, the others. I trained you. I taught you. And I found myself lying awake at night with the intensity of what I felt. I felt so much and so often, but still it all was trapped just below the surface. I was muted. I still am.”

The air was static, crushing them with silence. His face was slack, a blank slate reflecting her own shock at what she had done. Laid bare for the first time, Byleth shuddered with a nauseating relief, reckless with the splendid, sick sensation of breaking herself apart. She was breathless. She was real.

But as the relief faded, the nausea spread, building upon itself end over end until her head swam with untethered panic. He stared at her, appraised her, and she knew all at once that he did not understand. Worse, an inky shadow had crept into his eyes, poisoning the way he studied her face with the cold touch of fear. He knew her, truly, for the first time since their meeting, knew her secrets and uncertainty. And his knowing, Byleth watched as his confidence in her shattered. She was unmade in the blankness of his stare. 

Face flushed with the shame of her sudden honesty, Byleth willed her tongue to rest. But her voice continued without her consent, choked and desperate in the fading dusklight. “I don’t know what happened five years ago. I know I fell and was buried under the rubble of the Battle of Garreg Mach all this time, but I cannot fathom how I survived. Another gift from the Goddess, perhaps, but it was a gift wrought with loss. I thought I had lost you all, and then Dimitri…” her words failed her, unable to quantify the agony she felt under his icy stare. Sylvain swallowed hard, vaguely aware that he was shivering. “You have all been through so much, and I was not there for you. I should have. But I’m at my limit, Sylvain. I am so tired.”

His hand moved, caught her off guard, and she flinched. He flexed his fingers gently, signaling that he intended no harm, and the calluses of his fingers delicately brushed the skin under her eye. She had not noticed the tears that had welled and spilled, stinging and drying cold on her face. He winced, then offered a weak smile.

“That’s twice, Professor. Looks like you’re losing your edge.”

And then the air in her lungs was crushed from her under the force of his embrace, too tight and not tight enough and entirely divine. A strangled sob escaped her, muffled by the fabric of his shirt, and he pulled her closer. She fell into him, arms curling around the curve of his back, burying her head in his shoulder, swept away by the heavy, sweet smell of pine on his skin. And she wept, quietly, still and tender as the night air.

“It’s okay, Byleth,” he murmured into her hair. “You’re not alone anymore.”

\---

He dared not presume meaning from the evening they shared in the quiet, whispering to each other in the dimming light. They had parted from his overbold embrace, far past lines of propriety, and Sylvain had promised his support in any way she needed it. When he left her, the tears soaked into his shirt cut a cold sting in the night breeze. 

He was dizzy and euphoric with the suddenness of her - gone then returned, unreachable then painfully close. The warm, rough cinnamon smell of her skin lingered on his clothes, and he laughed to himself, wondering if that was yet another gift from the Goddess. As he walked entirely by habit the stone path back to his dormitory, he could still feel her weight pressed into his chest, against his shoulder. He had held her as though he could keep her together with his strength alone.

A pluck of shame radiated from his stomach. In his care for her he had forgotten himself, overcome by his warring desire to help and inability to find the right words. So he had broached the line between student and friend, risking an offer of something she may not have wanted in the first place. 

But she had accepted his care, hadn’t she? She allowed herself a vulnerability with him that she had never before shared, had met him in the gray between acquaintance and friend and given the gift of her trust. So why, he wondered with his stomach twisted into bruised knots, did he feel so utterly hopeless?

He sighed, running a freezing hand through his tangled mess of hair. She had said so many things he didn’t understand. The Crest of Flames, the Goddess, the powers which had allowed her to overcome the previous five years. He remembered the Sword of the Creator, splitting the air with a burst of heat and light, his Professor stepping through the rift, her eyes and hair the color of the forest. It seemed impossible then. He turned his thoughts to her words again, dripping the weight of a concealed soul. She had told him, of all people, the truth. 

Climbing the steps to the second floor dormitory, he recalled with a blunt ache their conversation in the Goddess Tower five years prior. He had been a child then, insincere and testing and teasing and terrified that she would be like all the others. She, in turn, had given him what he deserved, and her mistrust in him had broken open his own understanding of himself. He made a promise that night. He wondered if she remembered.

A significant part of him hoped she did not, hoped that, when she looked at him, she did not see the preening juvenile she had rejected those years ago. She certainly did not seem to, gave no indication of expectations one way or another. But rather than console him, her apparent indifference sparked a flurry of new questions, each more desperate and confused than the last. Was it that she didn’t remember, or that she didn’t care? Had she moved on? Had she ever returned his feelings at all? 

There was a light on in the dormitory hall. As he approached, Sylvain realized with a twist of anxiety that the sharp blade of light cutting through the nearly-closed door belonged to the would-be king himself, whose silhouette cut an imposing figure even in the lamplight. Sylvain froze, watching Dimitri’s movements from a distance. 

When Sylvain had seen the young prince in the reception hall upon his arrival, he had been bloodthirst incarnate. He moved and killed with the manic energy of a cornered animal, defending at the cost of preservation. Sylvain had seen in Dimitri’s face the unraveling of his mind. But standing in his childhood bedroom, the prince stood still, rigid in the room’s center. His face, angled slightly away from the crack in the door, was unreachable even in his isolation. He looked at something Sylvain couldn’t see, an unsettling kind of distance clouding his gaze. 

He looked awful. Exhausted, held together by coils of rage. When was the last time he’d bathed? Eaten? His clothes and armor were patchwork, pinned and stitched with a clumsy hand. The lamp cast gaunt, intense shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. He was physically strong, intimidating as ever in his glinting, black armor, but it was as though Dimitri were composed entirely of frayed edges. 

“If you value your life, you’ll leave me be.”

Dimitri didn’t look at Sylvain, but the prince’s voice felt like a vice around his throat. The flash of panic was quickly quelled by an unbearable morbid curiosity, and Sylvain, searching for cracks in Dimitri’s steely glare, slipped a hand between the door and its frame to open it. 

“That’s no way to greet a friend,” he said smoothly, leaning against the door frame. The annoyance was plain on Dimitri’s face as he turned to face him. “I thought you’d be happy to see me, after I went through the trouble of killing your bandit for you.”

It was a gamble, and one Sylvain instantly knew would not pay off. The prince tensed, shifting his stance into a predatory menace. He outmatched Sylvain in strength and speed and height - everything that mattered - but Sylvain found himself emboldened by simmering rage in his chest. 

When they were children, Sylvain had spent an undignified amount of time getting the young prince into and swiftly out of trouble. For bored noble youths, there was nothing more pleasing than seeing stilted, uptight royalty under the pressure of impropriety. Dimitri was an easy target, bred for table manners and piety and horseback riding and clothes threaded with gold. Even as little as climbing a tree had been enough to rattle his Highness. But Sylvain, with the help of Ingrid and Felix, had ensured the young prince’s safety with the earnest and, perhaps, theatrical zeal which only children possess.

When they lived and trained at Garreg Mach under Dimitri’s leadership, it was as though no time had passed for Sylvain. He fell back into an easy, teasing rapport with the prince - had even considered him a good friend toward the abrupt end of their studies. He often forgot Dimitri’s royal title, instead finding himself looking forward to the days when the prince needed advice, help with chores, or a simple joke. He enjoyed the ability to put a begrudging smile on the prince’s face.

He had ignored Felix’s cynical warnings, had hinged his belief in the prince’s wellness on wishful thinking. But, at his most honest, Sylvain had seen the widening cracks behind Dimitri’s eyes

well before Edelgard’s betrayal. There was a haunting there that had always teetered on the edge of swallowing him whole - whether Sylvain wanted to admit it or not. 

And now, standing before him five years later - a walking corpse, as he put it himself - Dimitri seemed determined to destroy everything in his path. The memories, bitter and beautiful alike, seemed not to touch Dimitri’s soul the way they did the others. Whether by his own hand or by the wear of years of misery, the prince was utterly ambivalent about the people for whom he had once sworn to lay down his life. It was pitiful. It was disgusting. 

“I will not repeat myself,” he said, expressionless. 

“My hearing’s fine, your Kingship,” Sylvain said with an edge, flashing a razor smile. “No need to resort to viole… anyway, I was just checking up on you. We were all pretty worried about you, what with your alleged execution, and all.”

As often happened when his mouth ran away with him, a small voice begged Sylvain to hold his tongue. But the whining prudence of his conscience only served to provoked his anger further. He found himself alarmed at the strength of his rage, numbly wondering if he truly could have stopped if he so desired. 

Dimitri simply scoffed. “My wellbeing is none of your concern.”

“No, but our wellbeing should be _ plenty _ of yours,” said Sylvain. “If your plan is to take advantage of our loyalty to get Edelgard’s head on a spike.”

Dimitri regarded him curiously, his rage temporarily dulled by surprise. 

“I’m not stupid,” Sylvain continued, “and neither are the others. Even if they haven’t yet, they’ll figure it out. Honestly, I don’t care one way or another - I have no love for Edelgard or the Empire. But I have more than that for the people you’re using.”

The prince’s face tightened, a subtle, ugly expression that lit his uncovered eye with malice. “Gautier has found his heart. How quaint.”

It stung, but something in Dimitri’s face made Sylvain swallow his searing retort. The prince stepped to him, braced and challenging, daring Sylvain to retaliate. But the way Dimitri’s throat contracted and twitched with apprehension distracted him. With a sudden and sickening moment of realization, Sylvain understood. The young prince was not daring him. He was begging.

Sylvain shook his head, suddenly overcome with nausea. “I didn’t come here to fight with you.”

Dimitri turned over his shoulder, head low, a torrent of frustrated mumbling in the low light.

“I’ll admit that I don’t know the first thing about helping you. I won’t pretend otherwise. But there are people who can ease the burden, and… Dimitri, there’s life beyond this.”

“No one can ease my burdens.”

“The professor can,” he said gently, and was washed in the truth of it. Her suffering expressions when she looked at the prince, her tenderness and steadfast reassurance despite his flagrant contempt. Her care. “She’s the best of us. She’s kind and generous the way no one else is, and she looks at you like…” his tongue was leaden in his mouth. “She believes in you,” he finished numbly. 

“She,” Dimitri began, cold and measured, “is a nuisance. And if she continues to get in my way, her blood will be added to the rest that stains my hands.”

The immediacy and intensity of Sylvain’s outrage left him breathless. “Oh,” he said simply, reclining his head to meet Dimitri’s eye. His voice was level, something akin to cheerful, but his hands trembled. “Okay. Yeah, I think I understand now. We were friends once, and I’d like to hope that guy is still in there somewhere. But you should probably consider this a warning.” He pushed himself from his place on the door frame, advancing on Dimitri until he had to look up to hold his glare. “If Byleth didn’t care about you so much, she’d snap you in half before you even drew your lance. But, if by some miracle, you got a hit in, I swear to the Goddess I’d bury you.”

Sylvain knew at once that he had shown his hand. But the prince didn’t sneer or taunt or respond to Sylvain’s open threat. His face remained blank, tinted with curious appraisal until he seemed satisfied with what he found. “I see.”

The words hung loaded over Sylvain, and he felt himself dull under the weight of Dimitri’s stare. He released a short, hollow breath, suddenly exhausted, and backed unsteadily to the door. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the hall, he let his fingers hook on the door frame to stop himself. Hesitating. 

“Dimitri.”

There came no response.

“Please don’t hurt them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ta-daaa! Thanks so much to the comments and kudos - I never thought folks would be as into this as they are! And thanks for the patience with my updates, turns out writing is hard and my hamster brain is fried. 
> 
> Anyway, thank god for this game.


	4. Ailment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For a moment, she could only stare. He shifted uncomfortably under the tangled sheet, drawing a ragged breath through clenched teeth. The feeling was unexpected and dull in Byleth’s chest - not fear for the young king’s life, not anger for his stubbornness, but a resigned and profound sadness like a final breath. He looked small. He looked scared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *rubs hands together* time for some manufactured pain and comfort, kids.

Familiar faces arrived in the ensuing weeks as word of Byleth and Dimitri’s survival spread. Some came for their old professor, inspired to action by memories of the class they had felt moved to join all those years before. Others came out of a grotesque curiosity, desperate to catch a glimpse of the ruined crown prince of Faerghus. 

For their effort, Dimitri isolated himself such that he seemed to vanish. Though he composed himself as the perfect commander on the battlefield, he could be found at odd hours mumbling fervently in the cathedral and single-mindedly ignored any who dared approach him, locking himself in his old dormitory otherwise. Rumors quickly spread that the prince truly had perished at the hands of the Empire, that the man who walked among them was nothing more than the ghost of his former self. Byleth found them difficult to dispel. 

It was during one of his rare excursions to purge a nearby bandit-ridden fort that Byleth first noticed the painful set to his jaw. He thought himself subtle, no doubt, with his strong gait and towering, defiant posture masking his discomfort. But he carried his lance gingerly and failed to follow through on his swings, and he had switched from using his right hand to his left to fight by the time he had gone through half the thieves. As they walked from the battle’s wreckage back to Garreg Mach, Dimitri braced his right arm awkwardly against his torso.

“You’re injured,” she said.

He pointedly ignored her, but she could see the tendon in his jaw pop as he ground his teeth. With a quick scan, she decided that Dimitri was not bleeding - not profusely, anyway. At the very least, they had time to return to the monastery without his condition becoming critical. 

The pain had begun in his hand, had started small and stinging before radiating a throbbing heat through his shoulder. His muscles had seized, and he could no longer flex or bend his fingers without blinding pain clawing at the nerves in his head. He was no stranger to injuries. Always one for overextending, he had spent his fair share of time in the infirmary with various sprains, bruises, fractures. And when he trekked the beaten paths of Faerghus, hunting the blood of Empire soldiers, he had become well acquainted with the unique agonies of battle. As he felt the swelling in his hand press painfully against the steel of his gauntlet, a squeezing panic left him breathless. This was something to be feared. This was new. 

He counted the steps as they approached the monastery, his tight facade slipping as they neared the southern gate. He rushed, heaved, trembled enough for the others to notice and look uncomfortably to each other for answers. When Byleth moved to follow him, he swung to face her - to block her - and commanded she leave him alone. Her eyes stayed on the sweat that ran down his face. And as he pulled himself up the stairs to the dormitory, the whispers had already begun to weave through the alumni, the staff, even the merchants. He didn’t care. 

Most regarded him cautiously - uneasy, but not overly concerned. At the dining hall, there was vicious talk among the Knights of Seiros that the young prince had been poisoned by one of his advisors. That someone had finally put him out of his misery. That perhaps it was for the better. “For the good of the cause.” Tense laughter was stifled behind hands. Byleth elected to eat in her quarters. 

Food in hand, she decided on the scenic route - better to clear her head with the cold night air, and fewer strangers stealing assumptive glances. The cold bit her skin, and she realized she was sweating. Nervous. 

In the dim lamplight of the greenhouse Byleth made out the tiny form of Mercedes, sitting on the edge of a brick-lined planter, hands wringing around a grey woolen cloth, speaking with barely-concealed panic to Gilbert. Byleth felt a rise of bile in her throat and concealed herself in the shadows. 

“Every time I tried, he would tell me to leave, threatened to...” Mercedes said, her voice quavering. “But just now, he didn’t say anything at all, no matter how loud I called. I ran as quickly as I could, but I couldn’t find anyone-” a choked sound caught in her throat and she pressed her face into her palms.

Gilbert put a gentle hand on her shoulder as she wept, but his eyes were elsewhere. He sighed heavily. “I had hoped it would pass on its own. Are you certain he was in his room?”

“I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I heard him breathing. The door was still locked.”

A hollow ring like metal against thin glass rattled Byleth’s bones, and her feet were propelled forward before she was fully aware of her own movement, food discarded behind her. In the dark she felt as though the outlines of her body were bleeding and blurring with the shadows as she ran. Her ears flooded with pounding heat, heavy and distracting and thick with panic. A cool voice like a memory commanded she control herself, but it was drowned by the sound of her own breath cutting the air. She ran faster.

There was the dim ebb and flow of candlelight under the door and a sound, short and broken and gasping, that cast waves of nausea over her. She tried the handle, and it stuck tight. She pushed, threw her shoulder into the solid wood, kicked it with the heel of her boot, but the hinges simply rattled.

Byleth sucked air through her teeth, her arm certainly bruised from the force. Her hand closed hard around the hilt of the Sword of the Creator at her hip, her thin scars white and bloodless under the tension. She drew, leveling the blade at the door, and raised it over her head.

“Uh… Professor?”

There was another shadow in the darkness, blended and silent. She had not heard Ashe scale the steps to the nobility’s dormitory, a book tucked under his arm and his eyes sparkling with anxious curiosity. Byleth imagined suddenly what she must have looked like, Hero’s Relic ablaze in her hands, ready to break down the door to the former prince’s private quarters. She paused, eyes wide, working furiously to find a way to remediate her compromised position.

“Ashe,” she said thickly. “I was just… hm.”

“Looks like you’re trying to break down the door,” he said simply, eyes fixed on the Sword. 

“I…” her tactician's mind froze. “I don’t suppose I can convince you otherwise.”

“Probably not.”

“Hm.”

The boy’s eyes trailed the line of the blade, over the door, and back to her. “Although I suppose you have a good reason if you’re slicing a perfectly good door in half.” Then, more tentatively, “Should I be worried?”

Byleth sighed, lowering the Sword and stowing it at her side. “The prince is not well.”

Nodding, Ashe came to her side and regarded the door. “I’ve been coming up here to talk to him. He keeps the door locked and doesn’t really talk back, but I figured it would be nice to hear another voice.” He gestured with the book under his arm. “I brought my favorite story. Figured he’d like to hear something new.”

“He let you talk to him?”

“Er, not at first. He yelled at me earlier, but I figured as long as the door stays locked there’s not much bite behind the bark.”

An odd, heavy silence passed between them. Ashe looked at her, and his gaze was like an embrace. The truth was suddenly easy, coaxed from her by the unassuming gentleness of his smile, the honesty of his care.

“Mercedes thinks he may be dying,” Byleth said. “I cannot allow that.”

Ashe’s face fell, saddened but not surprised. “I thought he looked bad, but even then. He’s so strong.”

“I know.”

His lips pressed into a thin, halfhearted smile. “All that said, no need to ruin a perfectly good door. There are plenty of ways to save a life.” He carefully set the book on the ground beside him and knelt before the door’s keyhole with a dancer’s grace. His hands set to work immediately, fishing a thin piece of curved metal from his pocket and fitting it gingerly into the lock. 

“I thought you’d given up the thieving life,” Byleth said, not unkindly, a small smile quirking her lips despite herself.

He laughed, real and warm. “You’re not a mercenary anymore, but you still know how to carry a sword, right?”

“I’m a soldier, more or less.”

He shrugged, still turned from her, but she was sure he was smiling. “Skills are skills.”

He worked quickly, but the minutes seemed to stretch as Byleth waited. He stopped only once when a strangled cry came from beyond the door. Hands frozen and shoulders tensed, he held his breath for a panicked moment before carefully letting it out. He continued, a new sheen of sweat on his forehead. The metal resisted, and Ashe curled his fingers firmly to brace it, chewing his lower lip.

The lock clicked.

Ashe slipped the lockpick out of the keyhole and quickly flexed his hands as though surprised by his success. He released the breath he had been holding and rubbed his face wearily. The door swayed open, no more than an inch, and bathed the boy’s face in a strip of warm candlelight. 

“If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to put our reading session on hold for tonight,” he said, pocketing the pick. “I think I may be a little out of my depth here.”

Byleth nodded, allowing herself a small smile. She thanked him and he returned her smile, but his eyes drifted back to the crack in the door, disconcerted. With effort, he collected himself and and quirked his head in a self-conscious half bow before ducking back into the stairwell. She listened for his footsteps to fade as he left the courtyard, only then pressing her fingers to the cold wood of the prince’s door. She steadied it with both hands, careful to quiet the old hinges.

The armor and tunic he had worn to raid the bandit camp was discarded on the floor in a trail where he had frantically clawed it from his body. She scanned the beige cloth for blood and was relieved to find it clean. 

A weak, pained sigh drew her eye to the narrow bed pushed to the corner of the room. There the crowned prince had gathered himself in a tightly coiled heap, left hand knotted in the sheet that did not quite cover his body. He was slicked with perspiration that pasted his hair to his forehead and neck in messy waves. He was trembling.

His right arm extended awkwardly away from him, palm facing up, exposing a swollen, purpling patch of flesh, the inflammation branching through his veins. It seemed to radiate heat even from where Byleth stood, pulled tight and angry under the tension of his shaking fist. Some kind of bite or sting, she thought, and the skin on her face ran cold. Byleth gingerly took the candle from Dimitri’s desk and moved closer, holding the light to his face. The color had drained from his face, his lips bloodless and dry. Though his single exposed eye was closed, he winced under the candle’s brightness.

For a moment, she could only stare. He shifted uncomfortably under the tangled sheet, drawing a ragged breath through clenched teeth. The feeling was unexpected and dull in Byleth’s chest - not fear for the young king’s life, not anger for his stubbornness, but a resigned and profound sadness like a final breath. He looked small. He looked scared.

Byleth fell into a methodical, mechanical step. She untangled Dimitri’s limbs from the sheets and covered him evenly to the waist, careful to avoid touching his right arm. She turned his body to lie on his side and brushed his hair behind his face, moving a bucket closer to the bed in case the prince’s stomach failed him. She fetched cool water and dipped fresh linen to press to his forehead, startled at the intensity of his fever. Then, sitting at his side at the edge of the bed, she drew upon her lessons in white magic and raised a healing spell. 

The room was quiet but for the velvet humming of Byleth’s magic. Dimitri’s face was illuminated by the dim, holy glow, glinting with the sweat that clung to his skin. 

He opened his eye. It was tinged with red around the edges, glassy, searching the room with a painful, hazy curiosity. A creeping, frozen horror overcame him, wringing his face in a clenched grimace. 

“I see you,” he whispered. It was said so quietly that Byleth thought she had imagined it. His voice, small as a child’s, trembled as chills overtook him, but his face betrayed a lucid, sharpened fear that froze Byleth’s blood. 

“I see you,” he said again, and his eye welled with tears. “I’m sorry, so sorry.”   


“There is nothing to be sorry for, Dimitri,” she said, gently running a thumb under his eye. 

“I couldn’t save you, any of you. I’ve heard your voice and still I can’t save you,” his voice hitched with effort. “And now I can’t avenge you. I’ve failed, I’ve-” 

He gasped, trying and failing to catch his breath, and his face dissolved into silent sobs that shuddered him. She placed a cool hand on the side of his face and the other on his chest, dizzy with realization. “Whatever image of me haunts you, Dimitri, I have never needed you to avenge me,” Byleth said, unsure if she should change her manner to emulate his hallucinations. As he wept, he pressed his uninjured hand to hers on his face, his grip desperate and painful as though anchoring himself to her.

“How long I have wanted to hear your voice just once more,” he said, his voice muffled through the weight of their hands. He looked at her searchingly with a bleary, half-lidded eye, and she wondered who he saw through it. Curling his fingers into hers, he said, “After all I have done… you have always been so kind.”

Byleth opened her mouth to respond, but found herself adrift in the haze of his pain. Her vision swam, her head filled with a sickly pressure that turned her stomach. But before she could right herself, Dimitri’s face contorted again and his grip crushed her hand in his own. His body tensed as he turned his gaze to the livid bite on his arm, which had begun to glow with radiant energy. 

The sound he made was inhuman. Halfway between screaming and choking, he tore ragged gasps only when his breath had run completely dry. He pressed his head into the sweat-drenched pillow, muscles pulled tight, extending his arm as far from his body as he could as though the distance would mute the pain. 

All at once his muscles fatigued and relaxed, and for a moment Byleth hoped that the pain had subsided. But when he turned to her again, the manic terror seemed only to build with each passing moment. His breath came in gasps and wheezes. He blinked away hot tears.

“Please make it stop,” he said, his voice little more than a breath. 

Byleth searched her training, her years on the road with her father, her infrequent lessons with Manuela, and came up empty. White magic was enough to stop most simple poisons on the battlefield, but much less a science than an art when it came to neutralizing unidentified venom. She had done what she could, short of plying him with experimental antivenom - which very well could have worsened his already-dangerous fever. One hand still pinned to his face, she stretched to re-soak the linen cloth and replace it on his forehead. 

“I’m sorry, Dimitri, I’m doing my best,” she said, careful to keep her voice even. His breath hitched at the cloth’s chill. Another wave of pain tore through his arm and branched fire into his chest, and this time he could not stifle the howl that echoed the halls of Garreg Mach.

Quickly, perhaps too roughly, she closed both hands around Dimitri’s uninjured one, lacing her fingers through his and pulling them to her chest. She was a stranger to comfort and could feel the inadequacy weighing her like a stone, but she suddenly knew to her bones that she would take his pain as her own if it would relieve his. 

She began to sing. She could not name the song, nor would she have been able to write the melody, but it lived in her blood and moved as easily as a breeze. At first, her voice was inaudible over his cries, more vibration than sound. But when he heard her - truly  _ heard _ through the haze of his pain - he held his breath, the barest ghost of a smile passing over his lips. He stared at the ceiling, listening to her, tensing and relaxing with the waves of pain, his eye moving over visions she could not see. 

When she was done, she released his hand and they stayed in simple quiet. His breathing had leveled to an even, heavy rhythm, exhausted but no longer agonized. The swelling in his arm had receded considerably, though it remained a blistered red. 

“I’ve done so much, I shouldn’t ask,” he breathed, finally meeting her gaze. “Will you stay with me? Until I… until…”

His face twisted, stemming new tears, then relaxed. Resigned. 

A bizarre, manic laugh bubbled in Byleth’s chest. She suppressed it, but an exhausted, affectionate smile crept through despite herself. “You’re going to be fine, Your Highness.”

He looked at her with all the sharpened steel of the previous weeks, then softened, fatigue clouding his anger. “Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t.” And then he closed his eye and, with a sigh like the ebbing tide, was asleep. How delicate his massive frame looked in the candlelight. How young.

Byleth smoothed his hair from his face. Her hand trembled. Her vision swirled. She pulled the chair from its place at Dimitri’s desk, and a new sheet of sweat stuck uncomfortably to her face as she sat. There she stayed, taking slow, deep breaths to steady her head. Then, grimacing at the sudden acidic tang at the corners of her tongue, she leaned forward, took the bucket she had placed at Dimitri’s bedside, and vomited.  The world spun once, reeling her with it, and her vision blackened to the sound of his breathing. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the incredibly long delay! This was sort of a departure from the previous novelization-type stuff, so I hope it still floats everyone's respective boats. I had fun with it either way. Next up: I have no idea! I am making this up as I go! Mwahaha!


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